Thu, 19 May 2005

seedling
“And everybody went a little mad.”

Every story I hear from family and friends seems to have a point in which there is some sort of breakdown of common civility and decency and logic, bound on both sides by desperate attempts to avoid it and desperate attempts to rebuild from it. It’s as if tornadoes were a daily occurence, the sort of thing one gets used to, as one gets used to anything, given time. Yet I’ve spent my whole life mostly in my head, walking small circles in my room while the rest of the world grew older and loved and responsible, and in that distance certain things seemed clear, the way the hills outside town take the form of a giant’s skull from the air, and I know now that the madness we all attract is not within us, but an exterior madness, drifting and waiting for us to let it in.

Her soul fell from her body and stained the floor before her like a shadow; she had gone mad, as in all the stories, but would not settle, would not work it from her muscle and skin, and so he took a gun to her. They tell this story to each other, and nod, quietly, ajust as they did when her sister climbed into the thresher. They play at reson with copper-bitter homilies, which is all they need to send off his guilt, what could he do, she’d gone mad. He stands on the porch now and surveys the schoolgirls while her bones spin like turbines deep in the earth, and I see her and him and the whole of the town, and softer, dimmer, I see the fluid of the mad spill out between them, as real as water and air and soil, and it poisons us, and cripples us, until there is not one of us left. I adapt its traits, and hide inside the light, and it gives up all its secrets, and I tell myself this knowledge provides me an advantage, so that like some gordian knot one decisive act could free this town, but as I try to explain this to the police before me, on the other side of his opened body, I realize I don’t have the words at all, except to say what we all know, which is that I’ve gone a little mad.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #